Killing when No One has Died
Sometimes I can agree with something in principle and disagree with it in practice. The death penalty is one such concept. Bryan Del Monte from the blog Right Commentary in his post Death is an appropriate sentence for the rape of a child… disagreed with The Supreme Court in the case Louisiana v. Kennedy that execution is an excessive punishment for child rape. The court’s 5-4 decision struck down a Louisiana law that allows capital punishment for people convicted of raping children under 12.
I happen to think, in principle, that the death penalty is just dandy for men truly guilty of child-rape. In practice however, the death penalty, for any crime, is wrong because we can never know if someone is truly guilty even if they confess. I could make you, dear reader, confess to killing JFK if you give me a few hours and a set of Ryobi power tools.
I left the following comment under Bryan's article:
I am opposed to the death penalty for any crime, not because I feel for the criminal, but because we are not God. In a perfect world, with perfect witnesses, with perfect prosecutors who will not fabricate evidence then the death penalty is a good way to keep the scum of society from repeating their crimes. It's a known fact that for every 7 people put to death in this country one has been freed or sentence commuted for reasons relating to false or erroneous conviction.
It's bad enough that most people cannot accurately see what has transpired before them, police will pressure witnesses to say what will convict someone, and prosecutors often fabricate evidence for political purposes (as we saw in the Lacrosse case). I do not trust the eyewitness accounts of adults let alone children. I do not trust our flawed justice system. I do not trust cops, prosecutors or judges. Does this mean I do not want a nation of laws and a court system to administer it? No, it just means we have to put up with a terribly flawed and imperfect system and hope that given enough time, evidence will eventually come up to free the innocent of which there are tens of thousands in our prisons now. I do not want to molly-coddle criminals but once we put someone to death, there is no rectifying a mistake. If we truly believe that life is precious, then we cannot allow ourselves to be so callous toward other human beings as to presume absolute knowledge of his guilt or innocence.
The problem with the death penalty is that most Americans have never been through the justice mill, have never seen cops "convince" witnesses as to who perpetrated the crime, have never seen prosecutors hide exculpatory evidence, have never seen witnesses lie on the stand, have never seen a jury deliberate on a murder case (except on TV) and have no clue how flimsy, flawed, imperfect, fabricated the whole thing really is. Most of the time, if a man spends a few years in jail for something he did not do, no big deal, he's still alive.
But when you're dead, oops, doesn't do you any good. If I were a perfect person I wouldn't bother with death for a child-rapist, I would stuff razorblades up his pee-hole. But I'm not a perfect person. Neither are witnesses, cops, prosecutors, judges.
Here is a typical, ordinary all-to-often case of how witnesses lied, the police "persuaded" witnesses to lie, prosecutors failed to investigate exculpatory evidence, and the jury convicted this poor innocent young man (who was executed) without a trace of physical evidence - not even a fingerprint or a bullet - tying him to the crime (1).
It's time to stop killing the innocent: "Twenty-seven percent of the wrongfully convicted people who ended up on death row had poor legal representation," say Barry Scheck, Peter Neufeld and Jim Dwyer, authors of Actual Innocence, a new book about this nation's troubled death penalty system.
Then there are forensic experts who fake the evidence:
TruthInJustice.org, Testimony Doubted in Execution Case
August 29, 2001
A man executed in Oklahoma last year was placed at the murder scene by the testimony of now-disgraced police chemist Joyce Gilchrist, but a police department memo obtained by The Associated Press says some of the scientific evidence she swore to does not exist.
The July 31 memo by a fellow lab scientist for the Oklahoma City Police Department refers to the case of Malcolm Rent Johnson, who was executed on Jan. 6, 2000, after being convicted in 1982 of rape and murder. Johnson, who had served time for two previous rapes, insisted he was innocent.
At Johnson's trial, Gilchrist testified that six samples taken from the murder victim's bedroom showed semen consistent with his blood type. But a July 30 re-examination of those slides showed "spermatozoa is not present," says the memo signed by chemist Laura Schile. Schile resigned Aug. 2 from the embattled forensics lab, citing a hostile work environment. She names the lab's three other scientists as agreeing that sperm is not present.
While the memo does not exonerate Johnson, it marks the first time legal questions have been raised about Gilchrist's testimony in an execution case. The memo also noted that Gilchrist's testimony had been criticized previously. Two appellate courts have ruled Gilchrist gave false testimony about semen evidence in the 1992 rape and murder trial of Alfred Brian Mitchell, whose death sentence was overturned earlier this month because of what one court called her "untrue" testimony. "There are now two cases where the results stated in the (lab) report and testified to by Joyce Gilchrist contradict independent expert re-examination of the actual physical evidence," Schile wrote.
People Cannot Help Fabricating Evidence
I have no doubt that witnesses, cops, chemists, and prosecutors who think they are pretty sure that someone is guilty try to fabricate the evidence just to make sure the perp gets convicted. What makes the prosecutor so sure? Well, he figures, if the witnesses, police and chemist think the man is guilty then surely he must be guilty and therefore there's no harm in rigging the system against him. What makes the chemist so sure? Well, he figures, if the witnesses and police think the man is guilty then surely he must be guilty and therefore there's no harm in rigging the system against him. What makes the cop so sure? Well, he figures, if the witnesses think the man is guilty then surely he must be guilty and therefore there's no harm in rigging the system against him.
So what is the poor juror to think? if the witnesses, police, chemist and prosecutor think the man is guilty then surely he must be guilty, who is he to doubt all these people? And so one witness either lying or making a mistake cascades into a mountain of false, fabricated, manufactured evidence all along the way. This is the normal way convictions are obtained in this country. I have no doubt that we put away a lot of guilty people in this manner. I have no doubt that we also put away tens of thousands of innocent people, shit happens.
Only Barbaric Nations Have the Death Penalty
If Americans only knew how often shit happens and how easily it could happen to them there would be no death penalty in this country. Do not misunderstand me, the death penalty is not barbaric against truly savage and barbaric men. It is barbaric, however, for flawed, imperfect humans to administer it. Here are nations where the death penalty is happily and often applied even for non-capital offenses such as adultery, homosexuality, taking bribes, etc.: Afghanistan, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Botswana, Burundi, Cameroon, Chad, China, Comoros, Congo (Democratic Republic), Cuba, Egypt, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Gabon, Ghana, Guinea, Guyana, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Jamaica, Jordan, North Korea, Kuwait, Laos, Lebanon, Lesotho, Libya, Malawi, Malaysia, Mongolia, Nigeria, Oman, Pakistan, Palestinian Authority, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Sierra Leone, Singapore, Somalia, Sudan, Swaziland, Syria, Taiwan, Tajikistan, Tanzania, Thailand, Uganda, United Arab Emirates, Vietnam, Yemen, Zambia, Zimbabwe.
It's easy to predict if a country has the death penalty, does it have a sizable Muslim population or is it governed by vicious communists? If so then you can be sure that it also has the death penalty.
America should not be in the company of savage, brutal, barbaric, and primitive nations. It may make you feel good to say "Kill the F*cken bastard," but some day, it could be you who is mistakenly thought of as that bastard.
ENDNOTES
(1):
Houston Chronicle, THE CANTU CASE: DEATH AND DOUBT
Texas executed its fifth teenage offender at 22 minutes after midnight on Aug. 24, 1993, after his last request for bubble gum had been refused and his final claim of innocence had been forever silenced.
Ruben Cantu, 17 at the time of his crime, had no previous convictions, but a San Antonio prosecutor had branded him a violent thief, gang member and murderer who ruthlessly shot one victim nine times with a rifle before emptying at least nine more rounds into the only eyewitness — a man who barely survived to testify.
Four days after a Bexar County jury delivered its verdict, Cantu wrote this letter to the residents of San Antonio: "My name is Ruben M. Cantu and I am only 18 years old. I got to the 9th grade and I have been framed in a capital murder case."
A dozen years after his execution, a Houston Chronicle investigation suggests that Cantu, a former special-ed student who grew up in a tough neighborhood on the south side of San Antonio, was likely telling the truth.
...
And the lone eyewitness, the man who survived the shooting, has recanted. He told the Chronicle he's sure that the person who shot him was not Cantu, but he felt pressured by police to identify the boy as the killer. Juan Moreno, an illegal immigrant at the time of the shooting, said his damning in-court identification was based on his fear of authorities and police interest in Cantu.Cantu "was innocent. It was a case of an innocent person being killed," Moreno said.
...
Second thoughts
Presented with these statements, as well as information from hundreds of pages of court and police documents gathered by the Chronicle that cast doubt on the case, key players in Cantu's death — including the judge, prosecutor, head juror and defense attorney — now acknowledge that his conviction seems to have been built on omissions and lies."We did the best we could with the information we had, but with a little extra work, a little extra effort, maybe we'd have gotten the right information," said Miriam Ward, forewoman of the jury that convicted Cantu. "The bottom line is, an innocent person was put to death for it. We all have our finger in that."
Sam Millsap Jr., the former Bexar County district attorney who made the decision to charge Cantu with capital murder, says he never should have sought the death penalty in a case based on the testimony of an eyewitness who identified Cantu only after police officers showed him Cantu's photo three separate times.
"It's so questionable. There are so many places where it could break down," said Millsap, now in private practice. "We have a system that permits people to be convicted based on evidence that could be wrong because it's mistaken or because it's corrupt."
No physical evidence
The Chronicle found other problems with Cantu's case as well. Police reports have unexplained omissions and irregularities. Witnesses who could have provided an alibi for Cantu that night were never interviewed. And no physical evidence — not even a fingerprint or a bullet — tied Cantu to the crime.Worse, some think Cantu's arrest was instigated by police officers because Cantu shot and wounded an off-duty officer during an unrelated bar fight. That case against Cantu was dropped in part because officers overreacted and apparently tainted the evidence, according to records and interviews.
During eight years on death row, Cantu repeatedly insisted he was innocent of murder. In 1987, he wrote to the Board of Pardons and Paroles, saying: "I was tried and convicted on bogus evidence."
But on the day he finally was strapped to a gurney and readied for a lethal injection, Cantu said nothing as his attorney watched him die through a special one-way viewing window.
